This post is going to be a bit geeky, and a tad technical. So there’s your warning. I’ve been thinking a lot about the forkable Domain of One’s Own wiki, with its GitHub underpinning. And I’ve been watching a lot of Ward Cunningham’s videos on the concept of federated wikis. And the thing I’ve come… Continue reading

UPDATE: Cathy Davidson replies in the comments. It looks like moving the the timeline out of the Coursera platfrom has been planned but not yet implemented; they will be taking a similar approach to the Rap Genius approach they are taking with the Constitution. Thanks for the reply, Cathy! I still encourage you to read… Continue reading

For as long as I have been involved in the Open Education Resources community there’s always been that moment in a conversation where someone comes up with the “brilliant” idea of building a central OER repository to solve the OER “findability problem”. I usually bite my tongue until it bleeds at that point and do… Continue reading

So I’m sure you know this — supporting 50 individual WordPress blog sites is draining and expensive. But if you have that sort of scale, you can get WordPress Multiuser instead, and put em all on that, and its rather cheap to maintain.  Likewise, as efforts around a technology expand, support per person goes down… Continue reading

New data this week about the Facebook being abandoned by the younger set: Now, there could be an error with the way this was computed — I’m fighting a number of edtech fires right now and don’t have time to dig into the methodology. But it matches the anecdotal evidence we’re seeing. One interpretation of… Continue reading

Short thought I had last night. TED, as we know, is an elitist event that with a problematic epistemology. I think this take from Education Rethink captures some of the larger problems with the format and culture: TED Talks are the megaphones in the midst of a conversation… When I tweet about vulnerability, someone will… Continue reading

There was so much good thinking by others on the web during my winter vacation. And I want to comment on it all — just as soon as I go through the purgatory of semester startup. Faculty need blogs, administrators need schedules and work plans, and I may even need to have a syllabus together… Continue reading

I’ve been trying to write a longer piece on an issue and failing, so I thought I’d put down the five paragraph version here, and see what Twitter thinks. Roughly, circa 2006 there was an corporate/institutional integration problem and a personal integration problem. The corporate/institutional problem went something like “We need to be THE one… Continue reading

Synchronous Online Sucks Synchronous online — the twisted mess of chat-rooms, video-conferencing, and screen-sharing we use for real-time online education — has sucked for a while now. To be sure we have products: it’s rare for a university to not have *some* web video-conferencing solution in place. And from what I understand, these products, at… Continue reading